June Newsletter: Call For Advisees And Collaborators

Dear friends,

GCRI has recently put out an open call for participants in our 2022 Advising and Collaboration Program. The Program helps people get more involved in work on global catastrophic risk and focus their activities in more successful directions. We welcome people at all career points, from all geographic locations, and with any interest across the many aspects of global catastrophic risk. No significant time commitment is required; participation can range from a one-time call to get advice on how to get more involved to extended …

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Pandemic Refuges: Lessons from Two Years of COVID-19

View the paper “Pandemic Refuges: Lessons from Two Years of COVID-19”

Refuges have been proposed as a means of ensuring that at least some people survive a global catastrophe. While it would be better to avoid the catastrophe in the first place, if a catastrophe is to occur, a refuge could be a real difference-maker in terms of the long-term effects on human civilization. Prior refuges research emphasizes highly isolated locations such as underground, underwater, or in outer space. These exotic concepts may seem far removed …

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June Newsletter: The Winter-Safe Deterrence Controversy

Dear friends,

The last few months have gone well for GCRI. We have several new papers out, two new student affiliates, and some projects in the works that I hope to announce in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, I’d like to share with you about a little controversy we recently found ourselves in.

The controversy surrounds a new research paper of mine titled Winter-safe deterrence: The risk of nuclear winter and its challenge to deterrence. The essence of winter-safe deterrence is to seek options for deterrence that would …

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January Newsletter: Vienna Conference on Nuclear Weapons

Dear friends,

In December, I had the honor of speaking at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, hosted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry in the lavish Hofburg Palace. The audience was 1,000 people representing 158 national governments plus leading nuclear weapons NGOs, experts, and members of the media.

My talk “What is the risk of nuclear war?” presented core themes from the risk analysis of nuclear war. I explained that each of us is, on average, more likely to die from nuclear war …

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Summer Newsletter: New Publications

Dear friends,

There have been a number of interesting new publications coming out of the GCR research community recently, both from GCRI and elsewhere. They cover a range of topics, from environmental risks to artificial intelligence to refuges for protecting against unknown threats. For your interest, I’m putting a summary of the publications down at the bottom of the newsletter. These are good times for GCR research, and they are about to get better next year when the Futures special issue comes out. That is, assuming …

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